Digital cameras have become more affordable and the number of digital photos taken for personal use has grown rapidly. While digital technology enables high quality photographs, the individuals taking the photographs are often novices who are unable to fully utilize the technology due to their lack of knowledge. Users dealing with a large number of image acquisitions may become particularly overburdened. The users may be burdened with the task of sorting through the images and directing them to multiple storage devices.
In order to assist the novice users, digital camera manufacturers have taken steps to incorporate extensive instructional materials. These instructional materials are often cumbersome and users do not take the time to fully explore them.
Current processes are available for allowing a user to transfer an image from a capturing device to an end user application or directly into storage. Some computer operating systems facilitate a method of acquiring still and photographic images from acquisition devices such as scanners, digital cameras, and video cameras, and inserting the images into end user applications. Although these acquisition methods may be user-friendly, the operations generally require user action or authorization and are not performed automatically.
As photographic devices incorporate increasing amounts of internal storage for images, the acquisition task for the user is also increasing. The importance of easily organizing images stored in permanent user storage is also increasing, as the user is required to spend a substantial amount of time searching a larger number of images.
Image capturing device makers generally focus on improvements to the image capturing device, underestimating the impact that an external computer might have on simplifying the user experience. Furthermore, image capturing device-focused schemes usually target image transfers from device-to-device, and thus ignore the power of the computer as an arbiter.
Accordingly, a technique is needed for helping users to manage distribution and storage of photographs in an efficient manner. A system and method are needed for minimizing management overhead for a user. Image acquisition through a personal computer operating system should continue to become more automated and flexible, while matching end user intentions. Such a technique would provide users incentive to take more photographs since storage space would be enhanced by the efficient distribution. End users would benefit from intelligent help that computer software can provide by analyzing image content in order to facilitate image distribution.